Drowned in a Bathtub

Rob Farley speaks:

It seems readily apparent that Republican ineptitude and obstructionism at FEMA, combined with the general problems associated with tight funding, have played a significant role in slowing down relief efforts. Whether more government competence could have prevented the breaching of the levees, we'll never know. Watch for the discourse the subtly change, however. Dubya has already admitted that the relief efforts thus far have been inadequate. The trick that the Republicans (and their conservatarian allies in the blogosphere) will be trying to play over the next few weeks is to convince the world that the problem is not an inept Republican government, but is instead the abstract concept of an activist government.

And Michael Ledeen unwittingly demonstrates why Rob Farley has a Ph.D.:

Why has nobody blamed the lawyers (I mean, it seems so obvious)?

New Orleans shows how hidebound and slow-moving the bureaucracy is, at all levels, from local through Federal. But the lawyers are always waving their codes, prattling on about the orderly practices we have designed to deal with daily life in this highly civilized society.

But when something like this happens, political leaders should recognize that those rules no longer apply, and that the only way to deal effectively with it is to switch to military codes of conduct.

Ergo, martial law should have been declared, a curfew should have been proclaimed, and armed men and women should have patrolled the streets. With military authority established, it might (only might, human beings screw up all the time) have been possible to have rounded up some of those buses and evacuated more people. It would certainly have been possible to protect the sick, the hospitals, the hospices, the nursing homes.

If you follow my drift…it’s the damn lawyers, as usual…

Yep, now we know the real reason bodies are floating in the streets, elderly people are still pissing themselves on rooftops, diabetics are lapsing into comas, and corpses are deteriorating in wheelchairs. It's all because a pile of nervous bureaucrats are afraid of being sued by southern trial lawyers when all this is over.

Holy fuck.